South Korean police find governor's wife made defamatory tweets

By

Wooyoung Lee

Lee Jae-myung, governor of Gyeonggi Province, gives statements in Suwon, south of Seoul, on Nov. 19, 2018, after the police referred his wife to the prosecution, recommending her indictment, for an alleged smear campaign during the 2016 presidential race. After months of investigation, the police said on the previous day that the wife, Kim Hye-gyeong, was behind the defamatory online postings against Lee's rivals in the party's primary for the presidential election. The governor flatly denied the accusations. Photo by Yonhap

SEOUL, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- South Korean police have handed over a case, involving the wife of a South Korea's Gyeonggi Province governor and her alleged defamatory and false tweets, to the public prosecution on Monday.

The Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency forwarded the case to a public prosecutor's office after it concluded that the governor's wife is the owner of a Twitter account that repeatedly spread false information and defamatory remarks in some 40,000 tweets for the past seven months.

Kim Hye-gyeong, who police viewed to be the owner of the most talked-about Twitter account in South Korea "Haegyeonggung Ms. Kim," has been accused of spreading false information and defamation and slander against political rivals of her husband, Gyeonggi Province Governor Lee Jae-myung.

In April, Kim tweeted that Jeon Hae-cheol, a lawmaker of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, who announced a run for a Gyeonggi governor race, joined hands with a ruling opposition party. Jeon reported false tweets to the national election committee.

Jeon withdrew his complaint last month, but some 3,000 citizens and a lawyer made another official complaint to the police for an investigation.

Lee hit back at the police accusations on Monday.

"Evidence suggests that the Twitter account is not my wife's," he said to reporters at the Office of Gyeonggi Province.

"I hope authorities don't bring my wife and my family into this fight," he said.

Lee has denied that his wife owned any Twitter account and never made defamatory tweets.